


Evasion

by the-nug-king (eloralouistra)



Series: Amell Siblings [2]
Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age - All Media Types
Genre: Gen, Mages, other Amells
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-12
Updated: 2018-07-12
Packaged: 2019-06-09 04:40:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,625
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15259653
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eloralouistra/pseuds/the-nug-king
Summary: The Amells had five children, all of whom were mages, all of whom suffered for that. The oldest, Orlena, got sent to Kinnloch Hold and eventually became known as the Hero of Ferelden.Tarynn Amell is the youngest child, and this is the start of her story.





	Evasion

**Author's Note:**

> Some warnings for this fic: child abuse is a big, big theme, and it also features filicide. There's also a short scene of an adult creeping on an underage girl, although it doesn't go any further than that so I wasn't sure it needed an underage warning.
> 
> With Cullen being in this fic, here's my warning for that again: Cullen Rutherford is not a good person in the fic. I see everything he does here as in character, but feel free to interpret this as a dark!Cullen AU if you'd prefer. That said, please don't comment on this fic with Cullen positivity, it's liable to set off my complicated triggery Cullen feelings. But I hope you all enjoy!

When Orlena Amell is eight, she uses magic to heal the scraped knee of her younger sister Ivy. Her parents, who have always put a lot of importance in their reputation, are horrified. They lock Orlena up in her room and tell everyone she’s too ill to leave. They spend the next six years trying to “cure” her of her magic, trying out every superstition they can find, no matter how much it hurts her. They make certain that no one can discover their shame, and parade around their three perfect, normal children enough that Orlena is forgotten.

And then Ivy’s magic manifests when they’re out in the market and everyone around can see they have a mage for a child. Ivy’s dragged off to the Gallows immediately and the templars run an investigation on this family with magic in their blood. They find Orlena, and she’s sent away to a Circle in Ferelden. With the whole town knowing both their two eldest children are mages, the Amells move to Starkhaven, hoping for a new start away from the shame.

Tarynn is born in Starkhaven soon after and only knows she even has sisters because her brothers Harleigh and Everard whisper stories about them when their parents aren’t around. No one in Starkhaven knows their past and the Amells are free to build up their reputation again.

So when Harleigh’s ten and his magic manifests, they push him down the stairs. Because it’s better to have a son who accidentally fell to his death than a son who’s a mage. But Everard was watching in secret and he knows what his parents think of mages, even when a few years later they hear news that Orlena Amell saved the world from the Blight and their parents start boasting about their hero daughter. (She never replies to any of their letters). When he’s ten and his own magic develops, Everard is ready. He keeps it secret from his parents, and that night he takes Tarynn and the gold he’s secretly been stockpiling for the last few years and they get out of Starkhaven.

They run to Hasmal, where they can fit in easily among crowds of refugees from Tevinter. There are always poor refugees who look out for each other, and it’s not hard to find someone willing to take pity on a couple of runaway children. There are mages there too, and they find an apostate who teaches Everard to control his magic, and Tarynn to control hers, when it manifests a year later.

So from the age of seven, Tarynn lives in a fallen-down house in the slums of Hasmal, scavenging food where she can. It’s exciting, and then it’s scary, and then it’s tiring, and then it’s just life, and she certainly feels more free than she did as a noble in Starkhaven. She can be loud now, and run around, and play in dirty streets, and most of all she can teach herself to fight. It starts off as scraps with other kids her age, but she knows her tired, scrawny brother who’s only a few years older than her has been having to keep them both safe by himself, and she wants to do what she can to help. So she teaches herself to exercise and finds a broken piece of railing she can swing like a sword and practices throwing stones at targets, and discovers she loves fighting.

She knows spells too, but the Amells all find debilitating and support spells come much easier than offensive ones, so it’s physical fighting she focuses on. But she and Everard do learn a lot of small, practical spells too; their teacher is from Tevinter, where there are no restrictions on what magic is used for, and life is easier when they use magic to wash their clothes, to warm their ragged blankets, to keep food fresh when they need to be able to save it up. They’re taught early on that trying to keep your magic in, squashed down, will never end well, but Tarynn finds that if she uses her magic for one or two practical tasks a day, she doesn’t have to think about it the rest of the time.

Life is good, mostly, until one day when Tarynn is eleven, and there’s an unexpected templar patrol, because they know there are many, many apostates hidden in the slums. Tarynn and Everard huddle together in their home, and their teacher tells them they’ll be safe as long as they don’t do any magic, but people are suspicious of him already, so he needs to get home before the templars question what he’s doing here. The templars catch him in the street, and provoke him, and he can’t help reacting in pain when they smite him. And Tarynn reacts too, hearing them push him down and threaten him, and then she can’t keep her magic in and sparks erupt around her, and the templars see, and they’re coming to the house, and they’ll know she’s a mage-

“No,” Everard tells her, squeezing her hand. “All they know is that there’s one mage here.” And he tells her to hide, and uses a spell to quieten her tears, and lets the templars take him to the Tantervale Circle.

Tarynn leaves Hasmal soon after that. She makes sure to keep tighter control on her magic,  and travels around a lot, pretending to be a couple of years older than she is to get minor jobs in mercenary companies and gangs and advancing her fighting skills. She feels like she’d be happy, if only she wasn’t alone, and she becomes so, so angry about the way her siblings have been treated, just because they were mages. The thought of never seeing Everard again is inconceivable to her, one day she’ll find him again, get him out, rescue him like he rescued her, _one day_. She has to. But the more she thinks about it, the angrier she gets about Harleigh’s murder by their parents’ hands. And the more she wonders about the sisters she never met, who were hurt and torn away from her before she was even born, and she wants to see them as much as she wants to see Everard again, and her goal becomes reuniting her siblings.

She tries to look for Orlena, but isn’t able to find her, the Hero of Ferelden is well-known for being elusive, she discovers. She hears about a rebellion at Kirkwall’s Circle, that most of the mages escaped, but it still seems like the best place to start looking for Ivy, so when she’s fifteen, Tarynn makes her way over there. She knows it could be dangerous; there will be people there who know her family, and even though she’s a grubby urchin in rags and patchwork armour she still looks like an Amell, but surely after fifteen years people won’t make that connection? And maybe they wouldn’t, but after losing all their children, after Ivy fled Kirkwall, after their cousin and her family had restored the estate and then left it, Tarynn’s parents had moved back to their old family home in Kirkwall.

Their guards “escort” her back to the house, and while they smile and tell her how happy her parents will be, Tarynn notices how they won’t let her out of their sight and how careful they are to keep her out of the public’s view on the way back. When they get inside, her parents are waiting for them. Her father swings a fist at Tarynn and she brings her own up defensively, and he lowers his smiling while her mother hugs her, everyone talking in relief about how  _this one’s not a mage_. Tarynn wonders what would have happened to her, had her first instinct been to defend herself with magic.

She tells them as little as she can about her time away, tells them she doesn’t know what happened the night she left. She was a young, frightened child who didn’t understand what was going on, why she and Everard suddenly left. She doesn’t know if he was a mage. He’s dead, there’s no use looking for him. She doesn’t want to talk about it. She doesn’t want to talk about any of the trauma of being lost alone, far away, she _can’t_ talk about it, it was too awful. They seem to accept what she tells them.

Even so, they watch her closely over the next few weeks, keeping her in while they teach her the etiquette she’s forgotten and never had a chance to learn, because of course they can’t have her sullying their reputation by going out there not knowing how to greet a fellow noble, or how to properly attire herself. She’s not allowed to fight - that isn’t a suitable activity for a young lady, she is told - and she barely has a chance to use her magic, as even away from her parents’ eyes, there’s few practical uses you can put magic to when you live in a mansion full of servants trained to make sure you barely have to lift a finger yourself.

Eventually, Tarynn’s at least able to explore the house on her own, and in the cellars she finds an exit into the dirty, cramped old sewers beneath the city, now inhabited by the very poorest of society and the people who don’t belong anywhere else. She feels comfortable for the first time since stepping into her parents’ house. She explores a little, talks to some of inhabitants, gives away a pearl necklace her mother draped over her neck to a sick looking woman hugging a baby to her chest. She punches back a man who evidently thought a noble-dressed teenager would be an easy target. She gives him some coins anyway because afterall, she would likely have done the same.

Tarynn goes back there the next time she can get away from her parents and this time, close to the Amell’s cellar, she’s surprised to find a large room, empty of inhabitants, but with a line of cots along the wall, and a collection of health potions, lyrium potions and bandages lining the shelves. It’s the Healer’s Haven, she’s told by the woman she gave the pearls too. There’s barely a person in Darktown the Healer didn’t help when he lived there, so they left it as a place of help. There’s an understanding among the denizens of Darktown that you don’t steal from the Healer’s Haven, you donate if you can spare it, and you don’t lift a finger against any apostate who needs to make use of it. The rest of the world may not trust apostates, but Darktown remembers their Healer, and they remember his struggles.

And it  _is_  a haven, Tarynn finds. There’s a pile of old clothes and a few pieces of armour in the corner, which look far more practical than the fancy dresses she’s currently being forced into. There’s a couple of walking sticks which hum with power when she picks them up that she thinks must be disguised staffs. There’s a map and directions to a secret tunnel in and out of the Gallows, and to several tunnels out of Kirkwall in the sewers. There’s a desk draw of coins, which she drops a few into herself. There’s a notebook, filled with messages mages have left one another, and left their loved ones, when they can only find safety here a moment and need to move on. There’s no sign of Ivy in the book, Tarynn is sad to discover, but she writes her own name in, tells Orlena and Ivy and Everard that she’s looking for them, in case they ever find the book. And there’s several copies of a messy essay by the Healer himself, a manifesto on mage rights it says, and she’s never been a big reader, that was more Everard’s thing, but for this, she wants to try.

After a few weeks, when her parents seem satisfied that she’s fit for public interaction, she’s allowed out of the house, accompanied by a guard. For her own safety, her parents tell her. He’s still willing to let her visit the Gallows though, when she asks a couple of days later, and seems sympathetic when she says she wants to learn about her sister. The templars tell her she’s not allowed to talk to the few mages remaining there, but she’s directed to Knight-Commander Cullen, who she is assured can answer at least some of her questions about Ivy. Her parents’ guard hangs back, trusting that the templars can guard her here. Anywhere else, that would make her feel free, but the Circle is just as much a prison as her parents’ home. She shudders as she passes huge statues of weeping slaves and wonders how Ivy could bear it here.

Eventually, she arrives at the Knight-Commander’s office. He stares at her in shock when she enters, but seems unsurprised when she introduces herself as Tarynn Amell. She asks about Ivy, and he narrows his eyes and instead of answering, asks about Tarynn, so she tells him she was separated from her parents as a child and has recently been reunited with them. When she tells him she’s fifteen he snorts and he looks so bitter. Tarynn asks about Ivy again, quickly, the sooner she hears about her sister, the sooner she can leave.

He knew Ivy, he says. Orlena too, back in Ferelden. Both of them manipulative witches, he tells her, with anger and with something else, something she can’t quite work out, but it scares her, and his gaze is too intense. He asks if the Maker’s mocking him, sending two mages and a child, and he doesn’t make a move towards her but she’s scared anyway from the way he looks at her, and she doesn’t like the way he talks about her sisters, and it’s been too long since she cast even a simple spell, and her fingers sizzle, magic shooting from her fingertips and burning through her new silk gloves, a wave of energy directed at Cullen.

She hears his snarl a moment before the smite hits her and doubles over, gasping, her magic _gone_ suddenly, leaving her feeling empty in a way she hasn’t felt since she lost Everard.

He stalks over to her and grabs her chin, pulling her towards him, tells her she’s another monster, no better than her sisters, that he’s worthy of the Maker, and stronger than her evil. “Look at you,” he snarls at her. “For all the three of you try to tempt me, you are  _weak_ , powerless without your magic.”

And Tarynn punches him in the neck, twists out of his grip while he’s spluttering to kick him in the shins and the testacles, spits in his face and punches his mouth for good measure as he reals back, and then she runs before he can call for backup, kicking off her fancy, uncomfortable shoes on the way, disappearing through the old tunnels from the Healer’s map. She runs through Darktown and collapses once she gets to the haven. Once she’s caught her breath, she exchanges her clothes for some of those left there, and is pleased to find a backpack too. She tosses in the jewellery and coins she had on her, along with some bandages and a copy of the Healer’s manifesto and she makes her escape.

She leaves Kirkwall through the sewers, breathing the air in deeply once she’s out because it feels like freedom, shaking with how relieved she is to have escaped Kirkwall, escaped the templars, escaped her parents. And she sets off again, to go and find her family.


End file.
